As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option is an information handling system (IHS). An IHS generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements may vary between different applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, global communications, etc. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
In most IHSs, low-level code is used as an intermediary between hardware components and the IHS' Operating System (OS) and other high-level software. In some IHSs, this low-level code is known as the Basic Input/Output System (“BIOS”). The BIOS provides a set of software routines that allow high-level software to interact with hardware components using standard calls. Because of limitations of the BIOS in many IHSs, however, a new specification for creating code that is responsible for booting the IHS has been developed that is called the Extensible Firmware Interface (“EFI”) Specification, and which has been extended by the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface Forum (“UEFI”).
The EFI Specification describes an interface between the OS and the system firmware. In particular, the EFI Specification defines the interface that platform firmware must implement and the interface that the OS may use in booting. How the firmware implements the interface is left up to the manufacturer of the firmware. The EFI Specification also specifies that protocols should be provided for EFI drivers to communicate with each other. An EFI protocol is an interface definition provided by an EFI driver. The EFI core provides protocols for allocation of memory, creating events, setting the clock, and many others.
In order to provide functionality for providing user input and output in an EFI-based firmware, the EFI Specification provides for a Human Interface Infrastructure (“HII”) database. The HII database is maintained within EFI and is used to store strings and fonts utilized by drivers executing within the EFI environment. Forms and other user interface properties may also be stored in the HII database. An HII database driver creates and maintains the HII database.
In order to provide access to the HII database to other drivers executing within EFI, the HII database driver exposes an HII database protocol interface. Other drivers executing within EFI can utilize the HII database protocol interface to store and retrieve data in the HII database. For instance, the HII database driver provides functionality for registering packages containing forms, strings, and fonts, and for storing the contents of these packages in the HII database. The HII database driver also provides functions for retrieving information about the data contained in the HII database and the data itself. The HII database protocol interface exposed by the HII database driver is specifically defined in the INTEL Platform Innovation Framework for EFI HII Specification (the “Framework”).